AMHERST - The town will start its 250th anniversary celebration on Sunday with a look at what it was like before the Europeans arrived.

University of Massachusetts anthropology professor Elizabeth S. Chilton will speak about a time she calls precontact archeology - when American Indians lived in the valley before the arrival of Europeans in the 1600s. She plans to paint the background to the colonial period.

Her talk is part of the January theme - Amherst before 1759. She will speak about what the area looked like from 10,000 B.C. until 1,000 years ago, when the specialty of the Indians was maize agriculture.

While Amherst has only 14 documented sites depicting Indian settlements, Chilton believes there are many more. Hadley, for example, has 117, but people have not been looking for sites in Amherst.

More sites were uncovered in Hadley because of its larger agricultural base, and artifacts were unearthed by farmers. Amherst is not fully developed, and it is likely that some sites have not been unearthed.

The Indians did not stay in one community all year. They were not nomads, said Chilton, but were hunter-gatherers moving seasonally throughout the area for food.

She said they planted maize in the spring, and returned in the fall to harvest it. They also hunted and fished.

When the Europeans traveled here, there was collaboration, said Chilton. But that changed when the Europeans began pitting one group of Indians against the other. There were misunderstandings about land.

"One of the most important of my take-home points is I talk about the contemporary people and the continuity of tradition," she said. "It's very alive and well."

She hopes that her talk will spark curiosity and interest.

Chilton, who grew up in upstate New York, was a mathematics major at the State University of New York in Albany before changing her major to anthropology. She needed extra credit, so she participated in an archeological field school.

"I was flabbergasted (to find) there was a rich native American history," she said. "I had gone through the public schools, and knew nothing about it."